November 18, 2015 | Quote
Three Ways ISIS Gets Its Money
Kidnappings, antiquities trafficking, and private donations.
Those are three—though certainly not the only three—of the ways that the Islamic State, or “ISIS,” the terrorist organization responsible for the attacks in Paris, funds its violent operation.
While much of its funding comes from oil sales, the group has also resorted to capturing individuals in an attempt to extract payment for their safe return. The group has kidnapped Americans and others, and in cases when payment was not made, gruesomely murdered them and released the videos on the Internet.
ISIS has kidnapped “multi-hundreds, if not thousands of victims,” John Cassara, a former special agent for the U.S. Treasury Department, told lawmakers on a House Foreign Affairs panel Tuesday. The group has used kidnappings to raise around $45 million in 2014, he noted, citing a Financial Action Task Force report.
“In fact, because kidnapping and associated crime, such as extortion, has been so successful, it appears the average ransom payment is increasing,” he added, describing a “vicious cycle” in which paying ransoms leads to more kidnappings, with those kidnappings in turn leading to more ransoms.
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“ISIS actually makes more money off of oil sales,” testified Dr. David Andrew Weinberg, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, “but ransoms have helped it and al-Qaeda conquer that territory in the first place.”
Another source of revenue for terrorist organizations are private donations from individuals in other countries. Dr. Weinberg listed four U.S. allies that “pursue problematic or even adversarial positions” over private donations to terrorist organizations: Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey.
“Despite promises to do so, they have failed to effectively obstruct the flow of such funds and to try punishing its practitioners,” he argued, saying his written testimony—available on the subcommittee’s website—includes “dozens of examples of such negligence.”
Dr. Weinberg went on to argue that “the U.S. should develop a broad range of options for when our allies refuse to do the right thing versus terror financiers.”
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Read the full article here.